Congo-Kinshasa: Fighting Ebola in DRC - 'It's a Race Against Time'

analysis

Paul Jawor, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) water and sanitation expert, has just returned from Equateur province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where MSF is responding to an Ebola outbreak, alongside the Congolese Ministry of Health (MoH) and other organizations. Paul was working in and around the remote village of Iboko, where 23 cases of Ebola have been confirmed. Here, he explains the challenges MSF teams are facing on the frontline of the ongoing outbreak.

We arrived in Mbandaka city by plane on the morning of May 20. Mbandaka is the main city in the province where the current Ebola outbreak has been declared. Some cases have been reported in the town and MSF has set up an Ebola treatment center (ETC) in response. But our team's job was to go and start an intervention in and around Iboko, a very remote village about 120 kilometers [about 74 miles] south of Mbandaka, where a patient had just been confirmed as infected with the Ebola virus.

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